Terzi's Lobbying Raises Eyebrows

The so-called Guardsmark Bill was inspired by the plight of security guards earning $11.50 an hour.

But on its way to approval by the legislature Wednesday, the bill was amended to advance the cause of workers in another industry, too -- broadcasters, including celebrity news anchors.

Al Terzi, anchor of WFSB, Channel 3's ``Eyewitness News,'' personally called a key legislator to urge the bill's passage. Terzi's WFSB colleagues Kevin Hogan and Susan Raff also lobbied for the bill, according to the legislator.

``Al Terzi called me,'' said state Rep. Emil ``Buddy'' Altobello, D-Meriden, an original sponsor of the bill, which concerned only security guards. ``To ask for some help on the bill.''

The bill, if signed by Gov. M. Jodi Rell, would limit employers' ability to restrict when and where security guards and broadcasters subsequently work. Considering how many types of workers are subject to such restrictions -- known as non-compete agreements -- the outcome raises the question: How did the broadcasters win out?

Sometimes, all you have to do is ask.

``That's how you work a bill,'' said Altobello, a former coach of a high school golf team that included Terzi's daughter. ``Personal appeal is still the best way to get something accomplished under the gold dome.''

Terzi was not the only well-known television news journalist who made calls for the bill, which raises other issues: Journalists should not make personal appeals to people they are expected to report on impartially, said Edward Wasserman, who holds the Knight Chair in Journalism Ethics at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va.

``You're also expecting them to then turn around and report, without fear or favor, on the very people to whom they'd gone hat in hand and asked favors from,'' he said. ``The whole problem with any conflict of interest is the existence of obligations or loyalties unbeknownst to the public that could reasonably affect your professional judgment.''

A more appropriate response by Connecticut's broadcast journalists would have been to hire a lobbyist, give the lobbyist specific instructions and then stay out of the process entirely, Wasserman said.

Terzi acknowledged feeling ``anxious'' about the implications of a news media professional lobbying legislators that he and his news organization interview and cover.

``I've asked the very question, `How do you get around the feeling that you've got an ethical conflict?''' Terzi said in an interview. ```What's the perception going to be?'''

But in talking about the issue with broadcasters who have advocated similar legislation in other states, Terzi found consensus that journalists need not give up their rights because of their work.

``The response those other people gave was, `We're still citizens and we have a right to speak,''' he said.

Terzi noted that broadcasters from most of Connecticut's major television stations made personal appeals to legislators and even went to the Capitol to talk with them about it.

In his own case, he said, people familiar with his work ``know that I don't hold back on anything. And they will see that in the future. If there's a lawmaker that needs to be challenged on a particular point, I'll do that.''

Terzi himself was directly affected by a non-compete deal in 1994, when he jumped from WTNH, Channel 8. He was off the air for most of the year.

Attorney General Richard Blumenthal first proposed the bill -- for security guards -- after Guardsmark LLC, which provided security at Bristol-based ESPN, lost its contract with the sports network. Guardsmark refused to release its guards from a non-compete clause and let them join the new contractor -- despite its own inability to provide other work for scores of them.

The clause forbade the guards from working for another firm at a location where they had worked for Guardsmark in the preceding 12 months. Guardsmark has said that the clause is a necessary competitive device and has successfully defended it in Connecticut courts. The company did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

At public hearings over the winter, lobbyists with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists told legislators that broadcast companies routinely force employees into non-compete agreements. Some of them say that the employee may not work for a competitor in the same market for six months to a year -- even when the station ends the relationship.

In small states like Connecticut, the agreements effectively bar broadcasters from working in the state, unless they are willing to be unemployed temporarily.

Before the February hearing was over, state Sen. Edith Prague, D-Columbia, had invited the group, which represents about 100 on-air broadcast personalities in Connecticut, to help write the bill.

``Do you want to give us some language that we could include in our non-compete bill that would protect people in the broadcast business?'' she asked Tom Higgins of the federation, according to a transcript of the hearing.